Getting things on Wikipedia

I’m a big fan of wikipedia. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s undeniably a fantastically useful resource, created by people giving their time for free, to share and enjoy. There are of course hidden barriers to participation, but in theory anyone can make an edit or create a page (as long as it’s not about themselves – that’s considered bad form and can backfire spectacularly).

Here’s a quick guide to creating a new page on wikipedia:

Although you don’t have to create an account to edit a page, you do have to create an account to create a page. This actually makes you more anonymous – otherwise your net connection’s IP address will be shown publically. That’s as long as you choose a name that doesn’t identify you (I do, but probably should – I’ve received legal threats for my edits in the past!).

I advise not using the article creation wizard. In my experience, that’s a hotline to a well-meaning person, who will however not have any domain knowledge, and will likely be looking for pedantic reasons not to accept your article rather than for reasons to accept it. This makes for a very slow and frustrating experience, and not a joyful sharing of knowledge.

It’s a good idea to find a page similar to your topic, click edit, copy the contents, and then paste it into your new draft as a starting point.

It’s worth noting that once you start contributing to wikipedia, you are part of it! Wikipedia is not a separate entity from you; likely all the people you’ll interact with will be working in a voluntary capacity, just like you, and decisions about notability and so on are made by consensus.

However! Unless you’re careful, your new page will likely be ‘speedy deleted’ for not being notable. Despite what some believe, there are no hard rules about what makes something notable, but there are a lot of guidelines.

So at first, your page will probably not really be about the thing, but instead about how notable the thing is. You can flesh it out with more useful stuff later. For example, here’s the current (at the time of writing) version of an article I just created. The first sentence briefly says who the subject is, and the sentence says why they are notable. Importantly, there’s links to three or four mainstream media articles directly about the subject. Without these, someone will probably speedy-delete the page. You could look into the notability guidelines, but as long as you have some decent mainstream media and book references, you’ll likely be safe. Look on google news and google books to find them.

(If you can’t find such references, then probably the subject isn’t notable by wikipedia’s definition of the word, and you might be wasting your time with this one)

Adding references like this is actually really easy – just click the ‘cite’ button in the editor, paste in the URL to a webpage representing the thing you want, and make sure you both confirm and add what it gives you (this involves pressing a button twice, otherwise you lose it – I do this every. single. time.). Apart from that you just have to add a reference section to the end.

Once you’ve created your page, it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on it (e.g. via your ‘watchlist’), so that you can contest nominations for deletion and so on.